See What Famous Movie Locations Look Like Today With This Nifty App

The exterior for Doc Brown's garage in Back to the Future (1985) was built in a Burger King parking lot. The next image shows what it looks like today. (Expand the gallery to fullscreen for the best experience.)

Today that garage is gone—but the Burger King remains.

The opening shot of 1998's The Big Lebowski tracked a tumbleweed past this taco shop. Today...

...it's a gas station. Progress!

The Dixie Square Shopping Center was the backdrop for a memorable car chase sequence in 1980's The Blues Brother. Today...

...all that remains are lampposts and a driveway divider.

Diamonds Are Forever, the 1971 James Bond movie, careened down Fremont St. in Las Vegas. Today...

...it's closed to cars and roofed over. (Still has the loosest slots in town, though.)

The corner of Stuvesant Ave. and Lexington Ave. in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood acted as a backdrop for 1989's Do The Right Thing. Today...

..there's a building in front. (But you can still see the mural.)

In 1986, Ferris Bueller spent part of his day off impersonating the Sausage King of Chicago here. Today...

...it's just some building. Phew, glad that architecture graduate degree could finally come in handy.

On their way to bust ghosts in 1986's Ghostbusters, the titular crew swung by venerable Greenwich Vilalge Italian restaurant Umberto's Clam House. Today...

...it's a different Italian restaurant. NOT SO VENERABLE NOW, ARE YA? (Don't worry, Umberto's just moved across the street.)

In 1976, Travis Bickle hung out here in Taxi Driver. Today...

...it's the site of the New York Times Building. So much for a rain coming to wash the scum off the streets, we guess.

Ratner's, a deli on Manhattan's Lower East Side, was a popular kosher deli that popped up in 1971's The French Connection. Today...

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See What Famous Movie Locations Look Like Today With This Nifty App

The exterior for Doc Brown's garage in Back to the Future (1985) was built in a Burger King parking lot. The next image shows what it looks like today. (Expand the gallery to fullscreen for the best experience.)

Today that garage is gone—but the Burger King remains.

The opening shot of 1998's The Big Lebowski tracked a tumbleweed past this taco shop. Today...

...it's a gas station. Progress!

The Dixie Square Shopping Center was the backdrop for a memorable car chase sequence in 1980's The Blues Brother. Today...

...all that remains are lampposts and a driveway divider.

Diamonds Are Forever, the 1971 James Bond movie, careened down Fremont St. in Las Vegas. Today...

...it's closed to cars and roofed over. (Still has the loosest slots in town, though.)

The corner of Stuvesant Ave. and Lexington Ave. in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood acted as a backdrop for 1989's Do The Right Thing. Today...

..there's a building in front. (But you can still see the mural.)

In 1986, Ferris Bueller spent part of his day off impersonating the Sausage King of Chicago here. Today...

...it's just some building. Phew, glad that architecture graduate degree could finally come in handy.

On their way to bust ghosts in 1986's Ghostbusters, the titular crew swung by venerable Greenwich Vilalge Italian restaurant Umberto's Clam House. Today...

...it's a different Italian restaurant. NOT SO VENERABLE NOW, ARE YA? (Don't worry, Umberto's just moved across the street.)

In 1976, Travis Bickle hung out here in Taxi Driver. Today...

...it's the site of the New York Times Building. So much for a rain coming to wash the scum off the streets, we guess.

Ratner's, a deli on Manhattan's Lower East Side, was a popular kosher deli that popped up in 1971's The French Connection. Today...

Jimmy Stewart went all over San Francisco in 1958's Vertigo, incluing the intersection of Eddy and Gough. Today...

...it's drastically different. The Lutheran church in the background was destroyed in a fire in 1995.

Like many innovative business ventures before it, the idea for SCENEPAST—a new iPhone app that lets you see what famous film locations look like today—began with five little words: "Wouldn’t it be cool if…"

In this case, the conversation in question was between longtime friends Michael Bernstein and Craig Bryan. They're not software developers by any stretch—Bernstein is a supply-chain management professional and Bryan is an entertainment marketer—but as the evening wore on and that hypothetical question turned to time travel, the two went from being friends to business partners. "We thought, Wouldn't it be cool if you could use movies and TV shows to take you back in time?’" says Bernstein. "So we decided to build an app around the theme of time travel and marry it with film and television."

A screengrab of the app.

Image courtesy of SCENEPAST

Launched in December, SCENEPAST presents you with a time-travel interface to dial in exactly where—or when—you want to go. Filter by year, zip code, or just choose "Nearest." A "Watch Now" button even lets you download the film or TV show directly from iTunes right on the spot. (How meta is that?)

SCENEPAST’s current library comprises more than 650 specific filming locations throughout New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and Miami; some, like Double Indemnity and It’s a Wonderful Life date back nearly 70 years. "We like to mix it up, trading between different TV shows, films, cities, genres, and decades," Bernstein says of how they decide which projects get added. "We may add a 1950s New York City-set film like Sweet Smell of Success, then start on a 1990s TV show like Beverly Hills, 90210." But while new content is being added all the time, you’ll have to find The Peach Pit on your own—at least for now.

Already, Bernstein and Bryan have sifted through more than 20,000 hours of footage, and they’re always looking for that next compelling location to add to the SCENEPAST library. "Once we isolate a cool location, we hope [that] there is a distinguishing street sign or building address," Bernstein says, though he admits that it’s usually not so easy. "On bigger films, like Back to the Future, locations are well documented, so you can easily figure out where Marty McFly lived. However, less popular films like 1983’s Crackers, set in San Francisco, can be challenging to figure out—but also enormously rewarding." Best of all, there’s no flux capacitor required. Just don’t blame us if you end up taking your mom to the Enchantment Under the Sea dance.